“It’s very possible,” Ader said. “Keller Williams has been involved in a number of acquisitions, is aggressively looking for new agents and certainly has been building a presence for itself in the Capital Region.”

The latest deal came about after the CEO and principal broker at ProRealty, Cecil Provost, met Weiss over the summer.

Provost founded ProRealty four years ago and built the agency using a similar business model as Keller Williams.

ProRealty agents shared in company revenue (Keller Williams has profit sharing) and had input in management decisions. The emphasis was also more on branding the individual agents than on the company.

“When this opportunity came along it was really a no-brainer,” Provost said.

Merging with Austin, Texas-based Keller Williams also gave ProRealty access to a referral network of 80,000 other agents in the U.S. and more opportunities to handle corporate relocations.

Given the growth of the local high-tech sector and plans in place for the $4.6 billion Advanced Micro Devices Inc. computer-chip fabrication plant in Malta, Provost expects that end of the business to expand significantly.

“I’m a recovering software engineer and saw what happened in Austin and Silicon Valley,” Provost said.

Janet Besheer, a nine-year real estate veteran who joined Keller Williams in March, will serve as managing broker of the Saratoga Springs office, located at 3 Maple Dell off Marion Avenue.

“My role is really to get this market center cooking with hungry agents who are out there, working it,” Besheer said. “In this time when budgets are tight you have the opportunity to create the business you want. ...There’s no one sitting around waiting for the phone to ring.”

The sluggish real estate market was good timing for the merger because Keller Williams emphasizes training at a time when weaker residential agents are getting out of the industry, Weiss said.

Keller Williams agents will be ready to take advantage of the market when conditions improve.

“We really teach our agents to go out there and fish so that in any market they won’t be hungry,” he said.